Epidemics Examined and Explained: or, Living Germs Proved by Analogy to be a Source of Disease. Grove John
have referred to the discovery of Suminski in this place to recal to the mind the great and incomprehensible wonders of creation, for who could conceive it possible or feasible that even for the impregnation of an inferior vegetable, animal life should form an indispensable and essential appurtenant of the process. Truly may we say with Coleridge, of plants and insects, "so reciprocally inter-dependent and necessary are they to each other, that we can almost as little think of vegetation without insects, as of insects without vegetation."
I will make but two more quotations on the supposed vital character of the germs of disease. "That the air and atmosphere of our globe is in the highest degree full of life, I may, I think, take here for granted, and generally admitted. It is, however, of a mixed kind and quality, combining the refreshing breath of spring with the parching simooms of the desert, and where the healthy odours fluctuate in chaotic struggle with the most deadly vapours. What else in general is the wide-spread and spreading pestilence, but a living propagation of foulness, corruption, and death? Are not many poisons, especially animal poisons, in a true sense, living forces?"—Schlegel.[3]
It were useless to multiply quotations to shew that the opinions here entertained are matters of general belief among thinking men.[4] I will at once then conclude with an observation of Dr. C. J. B. Williams: he puts the question, "Does the matter of contagion consist of vegetable seeds? Are infectious diseases the results of the operations and invasions of living parasites, disturbing in sundry ways the structures and functions of the body, each after its own kind, until the vital powers either fail or succeed in expelling the invading tribes from the system?"
And this expression, the seeds, is an universal expression, it is a "Household Word" in connexion with disease. That it has obtained this position in the popular vocabulary is alone a proof of the applicability of the term to the thing intended to be signified. Popular notions, as we have seen in the case of Jenner's discovery, are not to be unheeded. An instance occurs to me, it was a popular belief, that in acne punctata, the matter of a sebaceous follicle, was itself, when pressed out, a worm, the dark portion which results from the accumulation of dust upon the matter at the mouth of the follicle was supposed to be the head of the maggot, as it was called; subsequent observation, however, has proved that though this matter is not a worm, it contains an animal within its substance, the Acarus folliculorum.
The popular notions found among savage tribes as to the efficacy of certain remedies in the cure of disease have been the means of furnishing us with some of our most valuable medicines, indeed it is almost impossible to say whether originally man did not derive his remedies from the herbs and trees by an instinctive faculty impelling him, as it does the animals when in a state of liberty and with freedom of range, to seek certain plants as they avoid others.
It is well known that animals when indisposed will find out some spot as if almost led to it by a visionary guide where the "healing plant" is to be discovered. I am told that sheep have this faculty, and that they will, when affected with the rot, feed upon some plant when they can discover it, which eradicates the disease.
Almost every one is familiar with the fact that cats and dogs will crop herbage and eat it; I have seen them frequently leave the house and proceed to the grass in the most business-like manner, partake of some quantity, and quietly return.
A close observer of diseased animals might obtain some useful information by noticing the plants cropped by them while in that condition. The observations should be made in a variety of districts in consequence of the uncertain distribution of some even of the most commonly scattered plants; in one year they may be abundant, but in another they may be almost entirely absent from the same spot.[5]
Were it only on the fact of reproduction, I would be contented to take my stand that the force of life is the indwelling power of pestilential matter. Reproduction is a law of nature, and the law of nature is the law of God. And where do we find He prevaricates with us? The more we study His laws the more harmony and perfection we find; what is seeming confusion in the ignorance of to-day, is order in the knowledge of to-morrow. If any one ignorant of the law which regulates the diffusion of gases were told that a heavier gas would ascend contrary to its specific gravity through the septum in a vessel containing a lighter gas above the heavier, he would naturally doubt your assertion, and say, "that is contrary to the law of gravity;" but explain to him the principle by which this comes about, and the objects of the law; the order and beauty of the design become manifest. But this is no equivocation, it is evidence there, that subordinate laws exist and nothing more. It has never been found that men have gathered "grapes of thorns and figs of thistles," nor has it ever been discovered that inanimate matter multiplies itself. The seed of disease "is within itself," multiplying and propagating itself; whether it formed a part of creation at the beginning or not, is rather a question to be solved by divines than physicians. When we know, however, the latency of seeds and even of entire plants, and that they may be dried and remain so for years yet being brought again into conditions adapted to their active existence, they, as it were, revive from their sleep, and renew again their reproductive properties: can we wonder if, in the great scheme of nature, existences new to mankind should make their appearance? When the New Zealander saw the surface of his ground producing to him unknown plants, and the skins of his children generating peculiar eruptions, and each propagating its kind, would he look, think you, to the wood or the stones, the air or the water—for the solution of the mystery? No, he would naturally say these people brought the seeds with them. From the property of reproduction possessed by these forms of matter, we infer the value of the proposition.
CHAPTER II.
THE NUMBER AND VALUE OF FACTS TO SUPPORT THE PROPOSITION.
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SECTION I.
ON REPRODUCTION.
It is inferred that the proposition, "the matter which operates in the production of Epidemic, Endemic, and Infectious Diseases, possesses the property of vitality," we proceed now to the enumeration of those facts which further elucidate this subject.
The facts must necessarily be such as illustrate the identity of properties in the imaginary germs, that are known to exist in demonstrable germs: we take therefore the law of reproduction to be to life, what the law of attraction is to gravitation.[6]
But further; do those matters which engender disease furnish to our minds the properties inseparable from life in the abstract? Though the faculty of reproduction is essentially an evidence that the thing which reproduces its kind must be a living body, yet it is only a property or power of living beings and is not itself life, it therefore is necessary to establish the fact that the materies morbi not only has the power of reproduction, but also those properties which in the abstract will prove as far as demonstration can go, that it has the essential properties common to all living bodies.
I must again quote from Coleridge, he says: "By life I every where mean the true idea of life, or that most general form under which life manifests itself to us, which includes all its other forms. This I have stated to be the tendency to individuation and the degrees or intensities of life, to consist in the progressive realization of this tendency. The power which is acknowledged to exist wherever the realization is found, must subsist wherever the tendency is manifested. The power which comes forth and stirs abroad in the bird, must be latent in the egg."
The tendency to individuation cannot be more strongly marked than in the simple experiment of vaccination: we insert a small particle of the so-called vaccine lymph under the skin, and by this means we multiply to an enormous extent, the power which, in the first instance, we had in the form of minute corpuscles in a dry and apparently inert state; nevertheless, though in this condition there must have existed the tendency to individuation or multiplication of individual existence, and the germs are here to their active existence, as seen in the development of the vaccine vesicle, what the egg is to the bird,[7] as described above; we may, therefore, say that the power which exhibits itself